Rarity Rules

Pablo Picasso Chaim Soutine Joan Miro Marc Chagall Raoul Dufy Wassily Kandinsky Gino Severini Edgar Degas

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Buying Impressionist and modern masters is becoming an ever more fascinating but increasingly dangerous sport for those whose bank accounts allow them to join the art race. As rarity becomes extreme, the obvious trophies at the top of the art ladder fetch prices that no expert could have predicted. On the other hand, rarity can have the opposite effect when it comes to subtle masterpieces that only an eye accustomed to art can recognize.

The latest round of Impressionist and modern masters sales, held in London last June, spectacularly illustrated the divergent fates of works that benefit from celebrity and masterpieces that have only their quality in their favor. It also underlined as never before the near impossibility of estimating value, as several pictures shot up to huge prices disproportionate to their merits.

Take the two most expensive Impressionist works offered in the June 24 Christie’s auction, which turned out to be the most successful ever in Europe, with proceeds adding up to £144.4 million ($284 million). One picture, painted by Monet, was truly of considerable importance, while the other, a Degas pastel, did little to enhance the great master’s aura.

Monet’s Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1919, a close-up of water lilies floating on the pond in the garden he designed on the grounds of his Giverny estate, near Paris, is one of about 30 large-scale paintings of this subject that the artist painted between 1903 and 1926. The series sums up the master’s ultimate artistic meditation about the relationship between light, color and human perception. This particular canvas is one of the few that are both fully finished and signed, proving that Monet, satisfied with his endeavor, intended them to be seen by the public. It is part of a set of four, of which one was damaged by being cut in two and the two others now hang in museums. That made the picture at Christie’s a rarity to be fought over at all costs, even if it is not the greatest of all the Nymphéas. Estimated at £18 million to £24 million ($35.5–$47.3 million), it flew to a record £40.9 million ($80.5 million). Had I been a museum curator looking for a major work from the period when Monet was edging closer to abstraction, I would have gone for it, but as a collector I would have abstained. The picture lacks the magic of the greatest canvases in the series. Instead of fading into an ethereal colored blur, the water lilies are massed heavily on the right and appear to be crushed against the upper edge of the composition. Its record price was due as much to the impossibility of finding a better, fully signed, version in the market as to the work’s real mastery.

No such quality could be easily detected in the second most expensive Impressionist work in the Christie’s sale, a pastel by Degas, Danseuses à la barre. The study of two young ballet dancers training to do splits during a class climbed to an astounding £13.5 million ($26.5 million). Done around 1880, it is clumsily drawn, betraying the difficulty the artist sometimes had when rendering humans or animals in motion. The girls’ raised legs are painfully awkward, and the hesitant charcoal outlines only emphasize their shapelessness. How the outstanding Christie’s team of specialists could bring themselves to sing to high heaven this botched essay is a mystery. Perhaps they succumbed to a mirage, like thirsty wanderers in an artistic desert.

Monet’s Coucher de soleil à Lavacourt offered another example of inexplicable enthusiasm. The landscape, which Christie’s honored with a four-page catalogue essay, was dashed off in 1880. The paint does not even fully cover the canvas, as it does in the three other landscapes reproduced in the catalogue entry for comparative purposes. The hastily scribbled sunset view could be a first attempt at the composition used in Soleil couchant sur la Seine, effet d’hiver, which is held in the permanent collection of Paris’s Petit Palais. If confirmed, this connection would give the Christie’s painting unquestionable art-historical interest, amusingly overlooked in the lengthy commentary, without quite justifying the generous price it achieved: £2.4 million ($4.7 million).

By an ironic twist of auction fate, Monet’s sunset view came immediately after Lisière de bois, a marvelous landscape painted by Pissarro in 1878. The Pissarro fetched only £1.3 million ($2.5 million), little more than half the Monet’s price, making it one of the brilliant buys of the day. Admirably composed, it catches the essence of Impressionism in its first phase. The play of light on the green leaves done in thick, glittering touches of the brush and the contrast between the density of the foliage and the ethereal quality of the sky strewn with white clouds place the picture among the master’s greatest landscapes.

An equally desirable acquisition could be made that evening at a third of the Pissarro’s price. Bonnard was a versatile artist who cultivated multiple styles during his long career without heeding what others were doing, after the Nabi days of his youth. In 1929, looking at the sea from a balcony, of which the railing alone is seen, he painted a small masterpiece, La rade, with the sea and sky reduced to broad bands of mottled color. Were it not for a sketchy barge seen just above the railing and some hazy ships in the distance, the figural character of the seascape would hardly be recognizable.

La rade is not only admirable for its color harmony and delicately poetic mood but also holds an important place in Bonnard’s oeuvre, as is shown by the many exhibitions and art publications in which it has been featured. Yet it very nearly failed to sell. A lone bidder bought it for £433,250 ($851,770), which—excluding the 20 percent buyer’s premium—was well below the low estimate of £400,000 ($788,760).

If any doubts remained about the disconnect between artistic achievement and financial performance and the resulting haphazard price pattern that makes forecasting prices pretty hopeless, they would have been dispelled by the Sotheby’s evening session on June 25. The makeup of the sale—which included 56 works, versus the 81 at Christie’s—was different, and so was the mood of the room. Whether reassured by the considerable success of the previous day’s auction at Christie’s or stimulated by the higher average quality of the pictures in the Sotheby’s session, bidders jumped into the fray with greater alacrity.

The sales total at Sotheby’s—£102.2 million ($201.6 million)—was lower than the £144.4 million ($284 million) Christie’s achieved, but so was the failure rate: Only 5 of the 56 lots were bought in, compared with 15 out of 81 the night before. Prices frequently rose far above the estimates, evidencing the unrestrained bullishness that prevailed, and yet here, too, the link between aesthetics and financial triumph was tenuous.

The Sotheby’s experts made no secret that they had tailored the sale as closely as possible to the current taste of the buying public. To this end, they opted for Fauvism, German Expressionism, Surrealism and Picasso’s most provocative cartoon-style pictures, executed in just one day—in short, any paintings whose simplified outlines and highly contrasted colors give them instant punch. Ironically, the results, although brilliant, did not bear out the calculations behind these choices, the prices realized rarely reflecting the trends on which Sotheby’s experts had based their estimates.

True, the phenomenal success of the very first lot, a small view of the Parc de Saint-Cloud, near Paris, painted by Kandinsky in 1906, appeared to justify the experts’ selection process. Done in strong, contrasted colors and almost carved into the cardboard surface with the stump of the brush, the small panel belongs in a category of its own. It heralds the advent of Expressionism without actually belonging to it. Greater care is taken with its composition, and its color harmony is carefully balanced. At £1.2 million ($2.3 million), it fetched more than twice the ambitious high estimate.

Next came a Russian scene painted by Chagall in 1912 in a faux-naïf style. Although done in Paris, Les charpentiers, which indeed shows carpenters preparing building materials, is signed in the Cyrillic alphabet. Despite the great rarity of works from Chagall’s pre–World War I period, the picture merely matched the high estimate, bringing £690,850 ($1.4 million).

When the first Fauve landscapes came up, prices became utterly erratic. Raoul Dufy’s Le Havre, 14 juillet, in which flags and banners project from a row of buildings over a narrow street in the French seaport to celebrate the national holiday of July 14, rose to £1.6 million ($3.1 million), well above its high estimate. Immediately after, however, another Fauve cityscape, Maurice de Vlaminck’s Le Pont de Poissy, painted in 1905 in even stronger colors than Dufy’s picture, missed the lower end of the estimate as it realized £2.2 million ($4.3 million). Soon after, the pendulum swung violently back up with Chaïm Soutine’s 1929 canvas La jeune polonaise. The likeness of the unnamed young Polish woman, done in a Fauve-influenced style, with strong primary colors but not with the same energy as the Dufy and Vlaminck, also rose to £2.2 million ($4.3 million)—more than two and a half times its high estimate.

Later, enthusiasm for Fauvism sagged once more. Chatou, le pont, another Vlaminck view, failed to match the low estimate, bringing only £1.3 million ($2.5 million). There are greater Fauve cityscapes by Vlaminck, but modest artistic achievement was very rarely considered a handicap that week. Within minutes, another auction record was set as Gino Severini’s Danseuse soared to vertiginous heights. Painted in 1915, the canvas is hardly the Italian artist’s supreme achievement: The stylized interpretation of a swirling female dancer done in a lighthearted mood fails to convey the impression of unstoppable motion that characterizes the most dazzling compositions of the Futurist movement, of which Severini was a shining light. Influenced by the geometric forms of Cubism and painted in colors inspired by Fauvism but lighter by several grades, the picture is more charming than vigorous. Such flaws failed to keep it from skyrocketing to £15 million ($29.6 million), thus becoming the most expensive Futurist painting ever to sell at auction.

The place that the picture holds in American art history partly accounts for its performance. Severini sent it on consignment to Alfred Stieglitz in 1917 for his first one-man show in New York. Later, in 1944, it was acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where it remained until 1988. Eventually the picture surfaced in Switzerland, in the possession of the famous dealer Ernst Beyeler, of Basel, from whom the consignor bought it.

When prices become arbitrary to the point of defying the finest experts’ predictions, the temptation grows among speculators to press for gigantic estimates in the hope that beginners will want to match them when confronted with very desirable works. This explains the failure of Joan Miró’s enchanting 1944 abstract pastel and gouache fantasy on paper, which came with a pie-in-the-sky estimate of £3 million to £4 million ($5.9–7.9 million). The composition, as fresh as the day it was created, was the victim of its extraordinary quality, which led its consignors to believe that anything was possible in a market starved for art.

On the other hand, extreme scarcity also has its benefits. Financial triumph is no longer confined to masterpieces painted in the style most characteristic of their creators. Works that might have been rejected in the fairly recent past can now sell brilliantly because those deemed suitably typical appear only at distant intervals—certainly not often enough for their images to be clear in the minds of the new buyers who drive the market upward.

One of the most beautiful paintings in the June 25 session at Sotheby’s was Cézanne’s Verre et poires, painted in 1879 or 1880 in intense, singing colors. The black outlines are alien to Impressionism, but there is a magic about the small canvas that sent it soaring to £4.1 million ($8 million).

And yet, when equally unusual but very subtle works appear, these do not sell easily. That same evening, Monet’s La plage à Trouville only matched the reserve. The view of the beach at Trouville, which is now believed to date from 1870 (when seen in New York in 1907 at the Durand-Ruel galleries, it was given an 1872 date), bridges the transition from Romantic naturalism to revolutionary Impressionism. It is classical in composition but heralds the future with its sketchy brushwork and the elimination of such details as facial features. The problem with most present-day buyers is that they do not spend much time taking in complex paintings, let alone analyzing unusual characteristics. The picture, which does not fit with the image that the wider public has of Monet, did not sell when it appeared at Sotheby’s New York in November 2006. It was later the object of a private treaty transaction. This year it pulled through on just one bid. Nonetheless, this museum-quality picture was worth every cent of the £7.6 million ($15.1 million) it cost, even though it failed to arouse much enthusiasm.

The most positive aspect of the increasing rarity is that it triggers a search for alternatives to the vanishing great masters and leads to the acknowledgment of unduly neglected artists. Few have heard the name of Leo Gestel even though he was one of the best-known figures of Dutch avant-garde painting on the eve of World War I. His still life Gladiolen, signed and dated 1913, betrays a mix of influences, from Italian Futurism to the earlier French Fauvism. It sold at the June 24 Christie’s sale for £505,250 ($993,000), a world record for the artist but a very reasonable price for a picture of that splendor—avant-garde Dutch painting of the late 19th through mid-20th century remains vastly underrated, excepting that of artists who, like van Gogh and Piet Mondrian, left their homeland for France.

The Belgian Frits van den Berghe is another forgotten figure. In his remarkable Bloemen over de Stad, which also went on the block at Christie’s, the distant legacy of Fauvism may be detected in the palette, while some black outlines and the rendering of the plants and the houses point to the influence of German Expressionism. All this is blended in a beautiful picture, unlike any other painted around 1929 to 1930, when van den Berghe signed this gem. At   £241,250 ($474,000), the piece was a steal.

The relative underpricing of the subtler masterpieces of Impressionist and early 20th-century avant-garde painting may well continue until the last of these works finally leaves the market. The very few multimillionaire collectors who have been around for a long time are either deterred from buying by the overall price level or hold so much art already that they are rarely tempted to acquire more. And the ultrarich mostly hunt for obvious trophies in the areas into which the auction-house marketing teams shepherd them. It would make little sense for these marketers to encourage big money to take an interest in vanishing rarities.

"Rarity Rules" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.